Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday December 03, 2012 @04:45PM
from the hands-off-the-tubes dept.

wiredmikey writes "The head of the UN telecommunications body, Hamadoun Toure, told an audience at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) in Dubai on Monday that Internet freedom will not be curbed or controlled. 'Nothing can stop the freedom of expression in the world today, and nothing in this conference will be about it,' he said. Such claims are 'completely (unfounded),' Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, told AFP. 'We must continue to work together and find a consensus on how to most effectively keep cyberspace open, accessible, affordable and secure,' UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said. Google has been vocal in warning of serious repercussions, saying that 'Some proposals could permit governments to censor legitimate speech — or even cut off Internet access,' noted Google's Vint Cerf in a blog post."

That is exactly what I was thinking. I am confused as to why the people who are most vocally calling for the ITU to take active control over governance of the Internet are representatives of the governments with the strongest history of actively suppressing freedoms if the only reason for this discussion is to ensure that the Internet remain open.

Kia Ora cuz! I live in New Zealand too (for the benefit of everyone else).

I wholeheartedly support your sentiments. For me the thing is is, ICANN has to obey the laws and courts of the US where Free Speech is protected (vigorously, but outfits like the EFF and supported by the courts). Once the UN gets its mitts on the Internet there is no way anyone can try and influence it. Furthermore, the UN is corrupt in the sense that the resolutions that get passed don't actually match its founding ideals - yet there is nothing the citizens of the World can actually do about it.

Corruption of the UN
Why is the UN this way? unfortunately it is due to past and future conflicts (a legacy of the Cold War, and now influenced by the rise of global Jihad and Salafism). I refer you to this video for an overview (mid-way describes how the Non-Aligned and Islamic movements have joined to form a voting bloc to defeat the interests of the US, Israel and much of the 'Western' World):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Mupoo1At8 [youtube.com]

Case History - reasons to oppose the move
Now some on these forums have argued that the ITU has been good at what it does. This is entirely true. However, I would argue that this was precisely because the ITU held no power that it has avoided the manipulating interest of special groups. Once the ITU actually got power could those special interest groups warp the normal process and corrupt the ITU in the same way that voting the UN General Assembly has been corrupted by voting blocs? Well, I'll give two examples for consideration:

ISO was a pretty respected organization. However there was a fiasco several years back where Microsoft essentially stuffed ballots for voting on the Office OpenXML document standard (despite ISO already having adopted the Open Document format as its standard). Lots of 'first time' voters registered for this, chairman barred any dissenting questions from being raised and the standard was forced through. A clear case of a single corporation warping a standards body for its own interests (and arguably, against the interests of the general population of document users, who had a preference for truly open standards).

Second example. The UN is working on making criticism of religion equivalent to hate speech. This means you can't say that the beheading of criminals under Islam's Sharia Law is barbaric, because Muslims will almost certainly wail that they have been offended by your statement. It is an essential part of Free Speech to be able to criticize, even to the point of offense. It is no surprise that the anti-Free Speech advocates who pushed for this are also pushing to move control of the Internet from ICANN (where Free Speech is protected by US law) to the UN ITU - where they can regulate the Internet and *forcibly* prohibit *your* Free Speech.

One doesn't have to be an astrophysicist (although I am/was:) ) to see how these examples are the representative of possible future trouble if the Internet was to slip out from ICANN's protection.

Let's not give up our open Internet, and other Freedoms without making a fuss, eh?

"Why is the UN this way? unfortunately it is due to past and future conflicts (a legacy of the Cold War, and now influenced by the rise of global Jihad and Salafism). I refer you to this video for an overview (mid-way describes how the Non-Aligned and Islamic movements have joined to form a voting bloc to defeat the interests of the US, Israel and much of the 'Western' World)"

I'm intrigued, pray tell how does an Islamic voting block defeat the interests of the US, Israel and the rest of the West in the UN's organisations that requires a consensus vote? Even if they gain a majority a majority is still meaningless where consensus is required. Majority voting only works in places like the general assembly which is entirely unrelated to the ITU. The ITU for what it's worth was created in about the 1880s, about 60 years before the UN, which is a large reason why it has a very different structure to some other UN organisations.

"Now some on these forums have argued that the ITU has been good at what it does. This is entirely true. However, I would argue that this was precisely because the ITU held no power that it has avoided the manipulating interest of special groups."

It has no inherent power, nor will it ever do beyond that which is granted through consensus of it's member states - i.e. just about every country in the world. The ITU can only do what the entire world agrees unanimously it can do - you seem to believe it's some kind of entity that exists in a vacuum, that's not true, it only exists and can do things where states unanimously agree to let it do so. To date those powers granted have been things like assigning communication satellite orbits - because someone has to do that and if states do so independently you'll find countries accidently crashing satellites into each other.

"Second example. The UN is working on making criticism of religion equivalent to hate speech. This means you can't say that the beheading of criminals under Islam's Sharia Law is barbaric, because Muslims will almost certainly wail that they have been offended by your statement."

This is simply an outright lie. What would be correct to say is that a few countries have proposed this even though they have no hope of passing it, and even if they did there is no structure within the UN by which they could multilaterally enforce it on those countries who don't want this. It's worrying that to try and make a point you're having to resort to outright literal FUD, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and pretend that you've said this through lack of knowledge about the topic, rather than an attempt to maliciously manipulate the discussion using the politics of fear.

It seems the majority of your post seems to be a muddle of anti-Islamic paranoia and confusion about how the UN/ITU relationship and governance works. Your post reads like a Fox News fear piece, rather than a factual, useful commentary.

For what it's worth we've already lost our free internet, if you haven't noticed ICE domain seizures are already enforcing global internet censorship at the behest of a single government. This is the flip side of your initial point that you've failed to mention - that ICANN also has to adhere to the bad laws of the US as well as the good due to it being part of a single nation. The situation is hence not quite as perfect as you make out.

If you genuinely care about internet freedom you wouldn't be spending your time spreading FUD about the ITU/UN/Islam, you'd instead be trying to create pressure on the US to make ICANN a special entity that is above US law when it comes to demands from judges in some backwater part of a US state, or customs officials bought off by the MPAA/RIAA to enforce global internet censorship. If you did that, and achieved that, there'd be no valid reason for people to argue for a move to ITU control of ICANN in the first place. You're focussing on the symptom of the problem of calls for changes to internet governance, rather than the root cause - fixing US mismanagement of t

Nice false equivalency you have going there. You can't compare ICE domain seizures to free speech censorship. The domain seizures done by the US are against sites selling illegal goods. The only reason the internet is as free as it is, is because the US has been controlling it. That's why you have the right to sit here and bitch about how the US shouldn't control it.

Actually, some US domain seizures have been for gambling websites. Sites that are legitimate international businesses with a legitimate international web prescence.

But this highlights the problem, what is illegal in the US is not necessarily illegal elsewhere.

Unfortunately people like you are the reason the US can follow a downhill trajectory in terms of this sort of censorship, because you make excuses for it, and say it's okay because it could be worse. That's not an acceptable excuse, because it could al

Odd that I have any number of gambling websites I can go to and spend money in spite of all this censorship you refer to. Also, I make no excuses for censorship. I have zero problem berating the government for inappropriate takedowns. Just because ICE doesn't have a perfect record doesn't mean they are bad. Mistakes have happened and they should be correct but they are on record as not having any interest in censorship. That's a lot more than I can say for the UN. You actually believe they would do a

"Odd that I have any number of gambling websites I can go to and spend money in spite of all this censorship you refer to."

So because not every gambling site has yet been taken down it's acceptable to censor others? What a horrible failure of logic you just made.

"Also, I make no excuses for censorship. "

No, that's exactly what you did. That's exactly what you did just now too, you said, because you can access some gambling websites, it's not a problem. If you're instead denying any gambling websites were ta

Wow, you have no reading comprehension whatsoever. My point was that there are few gambling websites that have been shutdown and there's zillions more still out there. So, what's different about those than the rest? It's not like they are secret. Use some fucking common sense. Jesus, you're an idiot.

We're done here. You can respond if you like but I don't give a shit anymore because you probably have an IQ hovering around 80. Nuance completely evades you.

You're admitting ICE has committed censorship whilst simultaneously trying to deny they've been guilty of censorship, whilst also having previously said that you find censorship unacceptable and that you wont make excuses for it, despite now once again doing exactly that.

If you can't see how illogical your argument is than I think I'm not the one that should be worried about their IQ. I don't expect people to agree with me on everything, but I ask

Just because the current regulation of the Internet has flaws does not mean handing it over to the UN would solve the issues. In fact, it is far far more likely to get worse - which is our point. So what is the point you are trying to make, that having the UN regulate the Internet would be better and give more Freedom than now? I don't think that is a realistic position (gambling is very likely to become banned, as is pornography, sites criticising religion, political sites, whistleblowing sites etc etc).

Yes, but *you* miss the point (hence your disingenuous 'weasel words' yourself). The US-led voting bloc (that is, countries sharing Enlightenment values) is outnumbered by the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement combined with the Islamic countries. Just look at the content of many of UN resolutions, they all go against what the US would like. Your antipathy to the US is masking your thinking. Yes the US leads a block, but that is completely irrelevant to the discussion we are having because this block is

Don't believe me (I'm a nobody), but listen to Vint Cerf
Look, with regard to the threat to Internet Freedom you don't have to take my word for it. You might take Vint Cerf's though (I'm sure you you know who he is, right?). http://googleblog.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/keep-internet-free-and-open.html [blogspot.co.nz]
I'm afraid it appears that it is *you* who has an incomplete understanding of the issue. I hope the link I've provided prompts you to do more research:)

Why do they think they can take over something that does no belong to them? Fucking Nazis.

I live in NZ.

Uhuh.

Anyways, so what's your claim in this? You have a passport from an English-speaking country, so your input on something invented in another English-speaking matters why, exactly? Is it the common bond of a history of murder and delusion, are you just bored, or are you just, again, trying to take over s

germany may value freedom but not freedom of speech. Or to put it another way they redefine freedom of speech to not include things which americans or people from quite a few other places would include under freedom of speech.

Germany also orders rights differently. To americans freedom of speech is near top priority. In germany various things like privacy are treated as more important. This has upsides and downsides.

Perhaps those other rights are more important to you but when the future of the internet is

Yeah. I remember when some radicals held Europe hostage for drawing cartoons, and how the US bravely saved the day, not censoring South Park at all. Or how Obama supporters gleefully went on a hunt on racist little kids, bragging about destroying their careers because they exposed themselves as racists on Twitter. Free speech zones, and whatnot.

Well, the American order is based on the random set of issues that entered the US constitution and seemd highly relevant for progressive minds in the 18 century. The German order is based on other experiences which develop from the core principle "human dignity is inalienable". Of course, given the experience with 1930s hate speech you had a different priority order. In Europe the catalogue of fundamental rights is virtually the same.

So can I sell you any Nazi memorabilia? Email you a copy on Mein Kamf? Are you able to post a thesis on how you think the Holocaust was fake? Express an unapproved opinion on immigration? How about you dress as a Nazi for Halloween?

In our country these things are not PC. In yours - you'd be arrested.

Now all that Nazi shit is crap, neo-nazis are generally losers, and Hitler was an evil fucker. But to ban those things from your speech is a restriction on your freedom.

NZ has no freedom of speech provisions in any form of law. Germans care about it a lot more than your typical NZ'er. I am a NZ'er currently (for 7 years now) living in Austria with a *lot* of German workmates.

They can make their own internet. The UN can make its own internet, try to charge excessively to pay for the exorbitant lifestyles of its member politicians, and see who uses it.

New Zealand has some of the most expensive and crappy internet in the world. Also the original version was completely funded by the US.

Why do they think they can take over something that does no belong to them? Fucking Nazis.

You Godwin yourself and lose at the internet for the day. Congratulations.

I sure wish you weren't a New Zealander... You seem to be attempting to be as ignorant and

It was news to me that Germans don't care about freedoms. Quite the opposite. And there a few criminal laws against use of neonazi imagery for incitement of the people. I am fine with that. Fortunately you could curse on television which you probably won't do, but in 1971 someone axed a table [youtube.com].
The ITU is just the body. WCIT is a world conference, that means "all states" on equal footing and they revise the ITRs. The ITRs define the competences of the ITU. Now, the ITU is virtually owned by the telco compan

Dear Mr Hamadoun Toure: If it won't be curbed or controlled why not define attempts to do so as a crime against humanity [wikipedia.org] and access to the internet a human right?

For one thing, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that at least five of the security council members (Russia, China, the US, India, and Pakistan) would have strong feelings against giving up their ability to block the internet if and when they felt like it.

And I'd probably bet at least half dollars to doughnuts that the rest would too. Azerbaijan, for example. Wiki tells me their internet is pretty open for now, but the government likes to take a heavy hand against opposition, so they're a "probably."

Dear Mr Hamadoun Toure: If it won't be curbed or controlled why not define attempts to do so as a crime against humanity [wikipedia.org] and access to the internet a human right?

For one thing, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that at least five of the security council members (Russia, China, the US, India, and Pakistan) would have strong feelings against giving up their ability to block the internet if and when they felt like it.

I wouldnt bet anything on it, 'cause they can always have and "infrastructural failure" when convenient.:)

Can we retire this quaint old, now meaningless, saying? When that phrase was coined, donuts were a dime a dozen, less than a penny each. Now that donuts cost more than a dollar each, saying you'd bet dollars to donuts is saying exactly the opposite of what you're trying to convey.

The US government is certainly not an organization that values freedom over money. Yet ICANN has not done any of the following things that the ITU has proposed:

Unique identifiers for Internet users or their computers

Separate "service classes" for servers and client computers

A system of fees, surcharges, etc.

Special licensing for providing particular kinds of Internet services

These are the sort of things that, despite intense pressure from various industries, we have not seen on the Internet as controlled by ICANN. Sure, we've seen some censorship, but at the end of the day I can still use PGP and I can still run my own mail server, and I can do so without needing to obtain anyone's permission. This morning I ssh'd to my mother's computer to help troubleshoot a problem she was having -- and nothing stopped me, despite the fact that her computer is connected to the Internet through a "consumer grade" cable package.

ITU has a long history of designing communications systems that cement the power of monopoly service providers and which prevent people from hacking or coming up with their own solutions to problems. ITU's approach to the telephone network reflects its mindset; likewise with ITU's approach to radio. Amateurs? Hackers? You're lucky to get a tiny bit of space to play in, but you better not do anything that could threaten the big boys who provide "real" service to consumers.

To put it another way, if ITU had designed the Internet, there would never have been Google, because there would have been too much paperwork to fill out, too many licensing fees, and too many bandwidth fees to make something experimental like that work. The Internet's most important design feature is not packet switching, it is the idea that all computers connected to the Internet can do the same things, limited only by technical things like CPU or connection speeds. ITU doesn't design that sort of network; ITU designs this sort of network:

Well the ITU and ISO did design an internet... and it was simply politely ignored by the implementors of what we now call the Internet.

Other than governance the ITU/ISO model is one of top down design by committee. Compared to the IETF practice of bottom up implementation and design using RFC's and demonstrable code.

The former model led to X.400 (possibly the best known example, but not the only one) for Email. Pretty much non-implementable in full and with little inter-operability between the implementations that did get done. It died a quick (although very expensive) death.

While the IETF model has problems. They have managed to get the Internet to where it is today. Handing it over to the ITU/ISO would probably not be in the best interest of anyone.

Actually it wasn't ignored, the ITU made sure the US goverment *mandated* the ITU/OSI protocol suite and *banned* the TCP/IP protocol suite for any interaction with the US government in 1991. By 93 this had come to seem as ridiculous even to the USG then as is it does now to you and this quietly went away.

When the very first transatlantic ITU-protocol OSI/X.25 link was put up the first thing that went over it was TCP/IP traffic. Why? Because there actually *was* some.

Yet ICANN has not done any of the following things that the ITU has proposed: Unique identifiers for Internet users or their computers
Separate "service classes" for servers and client computers
A system of fees, surcharges, etc.
Special licensing for providing particular kinds of Internet services

How many elected US government officials have;
- Overseen and supported extensive national and international surveillance of the internet.
- Supported warrantless/roaming wiretapping laws which some argue are unconstitutional.
- Supported a tiered internet
- Proposed taxing the internet.

the thing is for as bad as the us government is I cant think of anyone else i would rather have in charge.

It is one of the handful of countries that have explicit right to free speech. Most countries have some limited right of free speech. Where if you say things that they don't like you can be charged for it.

Many of the countries at that meeting want cross border jursidiction where if you break a law in their country and someone there reads it you can be charged for it.

It may be their goal, but they won't get it. It's not what the ITU does and they won't succeed in their ludicrous proposals. They only make those proposals because they have no idea what they're talking about.

In fact, most of it is political theater. The ITU attendees themselves are well aware that these proposals stand no chance of passage. But the religious zealots in their countries are as ignorant of that as they are about everything else, and enjoy being pandered to. So when the proposals fail, the government can claim that they tried to prohibit blasphemy, but those blasphemous bastards in the West defeated it.

It's a dangerous and ugly game, because some of these zealots will take it as an excuse for violence. But as far as the leadership is concerned, as long as it's directed against us rather than them, it's all good.

There are plenty of functional parts to the UN: WHO, FAO, UNHCR, UNESCO, even the ITU. But it also gets used for a lot of grandstanding, which makes the news a lot more dramatically than the dull slogging work of improving health, agriculture, telecommunications, etc.

If the goal is not to curb internet freedom, then why are the foxes the ones at the forefront of the effort to build a henhouse?

It's a bit of rather disingenuous misdirection.

Touré claims that the ITU have no intention of touching anything to do with Internet governance, but this is not entirely honest: The treaty-making process starts with independent submissions from various national institutions and telecoms industry bodies. While none of them have any formal status at this point in time as ITU policy, a significant number of them speak specifically for the perceived need for transit fees for large content providers (e.g. Google). Were they to be taken up as components of the revised ITRs, they would indeed place limits on the growth of the Internet, especially in developing nations. The precedent of 'pay-to-play', for example, favours large incumbents far more than upstart content providers, especially those in the developing world, where cash flow is often limited and incomes small.

Given the rather stark opposition coming from the US and key EU countries, I still doubt whether any of the most contentious proposals will ever achieve the consensus required to become binding. And, as others have pointed out elsewhere, significant parts of the last (1988) set of ITRs have been ignored even by some of the ITUs strongest supporters.

As usual, MIchael Geist is the go-to guy to understand exactly what forces are at play here. His contention is that the 'UN takeover' spin conveniently hides a more insidious issue [michaelgeist.ca]: Who pays for content?

As for those claims that we have a crack team of ex-Ma Bell billing experts working on proposals to better 'monetize' the internet and ensure hilariously usurious returns on 'investment' by incumbent telcos? Well, now, I never disavowed that...

Right. I think it's fair to turn government logic back on them in this case. If they are telling the truth about their intentions, and they are not doing anything the public would object to, then why the secret meetings and media silence on the whole thing? Since they're being secretive and quiet, one can only reasonably assume that they're up to no good, and that they need to be monitored.

Is this the same ITU that wanted to charge me $1200 for a single binder of doc back in 2007? They view information as power and want to install themselves as the high priests. Control the Internet? I think not.

Long distance and national phone calls are charged at a higher rate as it is the simplest way of getting businesses and wealthy people to subsidize the maintenance of the local telephone network.

It's also a dis-incentive to the peoples of different regions to develop close, regular contact, thus promoting social and cultural divisions based on fear, ignorance, hatred, and mistrust. The more divided people are, the easier they are to control.

The internet has exploded far beyond expectations in almost every metric, and this threatens the entire current power structures of both governments and commerce worldwide. Depend on the powers that be attempting to control what and who is on it and how it is us

One of the inventors of the telephone system was actually run out of a city after demonstrating the telegraph in front of an auddience. The crime was "performing illegal communication between two cities".

Things got quite weird and interesting for a while in the very early days of radio as well, until, much like now, all the governments got together to craft treaties to clamp down and control who had access to, and what was said over, the airwaves.

Just as is happening now with the attempts (and successes) at placing ever-more controls, restrictions, and intrusive monitoring on the internet, reasons were trotted out such as controlling chaos, crime, maintaining the publics' "moral turpitude" and more, as just

Shorter Vint Cerf: Some proposals would actually allow sovereign governments to enforce their sovereignty, as bad as that may be.

Nobody would support the UN forcing the US government to do anything; it's funny when we're shocked that Russia or China would insist on being able to regulate cables and boxen that operate on their own frigging soil.

Of course governments can censor speech and cut off Internet access, that's their prerogative. Or are we working from the idea that the Internet is actually greater and more important than any government, and that the laws of a state (democratic or not) are not binding upon it? How do you think an American government would react if it was told by the UN, or Mexico, that it was forbidden from arresting undocumented migrants, because such action would infringe upon an individual's absolute freedom of movement, as protected by some UN declaration of human rights?

Freedom is a good thing, freedom of speech is a good thing, in the US we are blessed to have a national polity that respects it. The Internet can allow it to flourish in other places too. However, any goodwill for your cause is likely going to be depleted twice over if people in Iran and Burma come to believe that, as shitty as their government may be, actual decisions that govern their virtual life take place in Marina del Rey, and it wouldn't matter who was running their country. They'd call it imperialism, and they'd be right.

Shorter Vint Cerf: Some proposals would actually allow sovereign governments to enforce their sovereignty, as bad as that may be.

Yup, and that's a bad thing. No accommodations should be made to make things easy for censorious, oppressive governments to act in such a manner. All the burden should be on their end, rather than worked into some sort of legalistic framework ripe for abuse.

Of course governments can censor speech and cut off Internet access, that's their prerogative.

No accommodations should be made to make things easy for censorious, oppressive governments to act in such a manner.

I don't see how this principle could stand, without forcing nation-states to submit their laws to the UN (or Vint Cerf for that matter) for approval as "sufficiently non-oppresive." Let alone your proposal for Internet trade warfare -- do you really think denying Amazon.com to the people of Shiraz is going to get them to turn against the Basij?

Supressing parties? You mean the Communist Party or the Reichspartei ruled unconstitutional in the 1950ths?
Look, the sovereignty principle is fine but the ITU is actually a corrupt and geriatric telecom cartel. The WCIT is a world conference of states. One of the proposals says that ITU-T recommendations become binding for members.

I have no kind words for the ITU, but any replacement that attempts to breach national sovereignty, under the cover of "International human rights" or any idealistic conception, is apt to be counterproductive and a net negative to world peace and the rule of law.

"But is it the prerogative of the people in that country? Or is it a government acting unilaterally for the sake of retaining power? Should we be accepting or tolerant of that?"

It's up to the people of that country to do something about it. It's a painful situation to watch sometimes, seeing people oppressed by their government, but as things like Iraq have taught us, intervention can be so much worse. Saddam's use of chemical weapons and so forth to kill 5,000 odd civilians was sick, but was the situation

International law is based upon sovereign states which coexist. Article 2 of the UN Charta. If you don't like your government feel free to get a new one. If you don't like your state feel free to proclaim a new one. Unfortunately most governments don't like the idea of sovereign citizens or secession as the US civil war demonstrates.

I'm not advocating violent revolution. All I'm saying is governments only exist because we individuals generally agree that they can be of some use to us. That's what's important; not what politicians or bureaucrats or rulers want. Their opinions are irrelevant. If our governments aren't focussed on that, then they need to be redirected so that they are.

Educate your elected representatives, or swap them out for someone else who can be.

Awesome, now go to the UN and tell Indonesia that's why you're banhammering them from the Internet unless they stop censoring YouTube.

That's the GPs point, that the Internet (read: US political appointees and telecom consortia) has the right to cut off any country it pleases if they exceed some standard of illiberalism. It has nothing to do with how a country is governed, places like Indonesia or the UAE have really popular and democratic despotisms.

Note that you've shifted the argument from "the Internet," to "individuals," as if The Internet and the decisions of any Internet regulatory body were somehow equivalent to, and deserved the same high standard of protection as, individual rights.

As if the present governing institutions of the Internet weren't a cartel? An intensely pro-western one at that, and where you see the Internet fighting for individual rights, more than few others see it as a club that works to expand western cultural hegemony. It

Of course governments can censor speech and cut off Internet access, that's their prerogative.

Just to be 100% sure here: You are arguing that governments have a right to to censor speech and cut off Internet access (like I have a right to shoot a robber that breaks into my house during night and attacks me), not that are able to censor speech and cut off Internet access (like a gang of robbers can kill you and steal your stuff)? Your talk about sovereign governments and prerogative makes me suspect you vie

Q: What is the difference between the US and UN controlled internet? Both guarantee freedom of speech.
A: Yes, but the USA also guarantees freedom after the speech.
ie Open, accessible, affordable - sounds like a trap to get you online.
The secure sounds like easy tracking at any point along the network.

I've said it before: decentralize it, it's the only way to be sure. The USA govt. at the moment (via the Dept. Commerce) has effective control over the generic domain names. And they use that control. They shut down websites for all sorts of reasons, including accidentally. They shut down websites that are operating in foreign countries, hosted in foreign countries, and don't even target US citizens. Oh, but they happen to host links to copyrighted material. Or they happen to be doing a perfectly legal thing in their own country, e.g. providing DRM breaking tools, or online gambling, but which isn't legal in the USA.

And people think that the ITU is some how going to be worse? It would be different, but I can't see how it could be worse (you couldn't get all the countries to agree anyway, and if the USA really cared, they could just veto stuff; I think the ITU operates on a consensus model). (Fun fact: the ITU is older than the UN, and the previous League of Nations; it was setup back in the 1800s.)

Still, the best solution is to decentralize. Perhaps a web of trust; I trust this person (these people) and they (a clear majority) say that this domain resolves to this IP address. Actually, the domain name system is already a trust exercise, with people choosing which resolver to go with (e.g. I currently use Google's 8.8.8.8 as I can't remember the local one, and I'm not sure I would trust it more than Google anyway), and the resolver ultimately choosing a root.

So why can't we decentralize it more? Come on people, I know there are lots of smart people, get together and work out an alternative DNS and make it really easy for everyone to use. And make it not be in the hands of anyway. Perhaps a federalized system. But remove control from governments and corporations and give it back to the people, just like God intended when he created the Internet. (Also more people use FreeNet please.)

I've said it before: decentralize it, it's the only way to be sure. The USA govt. at the moment (via the Dept. Commerce) has effective control over the generic domain names.

But as far as I know each country manage their own country domain so they don't have a monopoly on domain names. That's why TPB moved from.org to.se and they're hardly less popular because of it. That's roughly as decentralized as you can get without terrible headaches with namespace crashes where my "slashdot.org" is different than your "slashdot.org" - you'll be destroying the one Internet where everyone can reach the same sites and restore many of the old borders Internet has been tearing down. Imagine

Depends on how it is "controlled". If it is like the security council, all the major players (rather, the five major winners after WW2) get a veto. In which case the US can veto anything they don't like, keeping it like it is now. Right? If it's like certain other UN organizations, and operates on consensus, then any player can veto anything they don't like. That means fewer changes, and keeping things the same, that's what you want isn't it?

But it's not just CP/IP. You can also get shut down for things including, but not limited to:
- Carrying information deemed to be "propaganda" for groups hostile to US interests
- Selling holiday flights to Cuba
- Publishing information that the US gov't deems 'classified'
- Running an online casino

This vaunted 'freedom of expression on the Internet' has only ever been as deep as the government wanted it to be.

Folks will use the internet available to them, as dictated by their residence in European countries or elsewhere. They may "choose" their internet by moving to another country, and that's not a realistic solution. Your assertion that people have a choice between UN internet and "other" internet is false.

I'll believe that when when we have built-in end-to-end encryption off all Internet traffic by default, get rid of mandatory (CALEA) backdoors in telecomm equipment and get equal privacy for electronic communications.

As to censorship, the ITU never proposed censoring the Internet. That's not their bailiwick -- national governments can and do censor domestic Internet access, and the ITU can't stop them. Nor can it force a government to do anything. The US can simply declare an Exception to an ITU rule and it doesn't apply here. Enough bilateral Exceptions and the ITU is irrelevant.

I did read the more controversial proposals. What a lot of countries wanted was to treat the Internet as if it were telecommunications (it is seen in the US as the content of telecommunications, not the telecommunications itself) and to apply telephone call-like charging to packets. So if somebody in Benin or Fiji downloaded a movie from YouTube, their country would receive payment from YouTube. In many countries this would go to the government, supposedly to pay for the network facilities but of course many of these countries are remarkably corrupt...

And unlike a phone call, where the party who dials the call pays, Internet payments would be made by the side sending the packets, even if the other side asked them to. This would of course probably cause YouTube and other high-volume information sources to shut off access to those countries. Not censorship per se, but pay to talk.

Other proposals on the table are technically unworkable, but then the old PTT (post-telegraph-telephone) guys who dominate ITU-T don't understand how the Internet works (very, very tenuously).

Any talk about "Legitimate" speech is on the same level as "Legitimate Rape". All speech is legitimate, though, clearly the UN and most of its members do not.

Don't believe me that the UN classifies political dissent as non-protected? Just look at their "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#atop [un.org] where it says Article 29: (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Do we really want people controlling the internet who in their own "bill of rights" basically say you don't have these basic, "universal" rights if you disagree with us?

All speech is legitimate. If words threaten you so badly you can't refute them on their grounds; well.. the truth is a bitch.

As far as I can tell, the USA is as close a bastion of true free speech as exists, and that right hasn't been molested too badly. I do not want my internet in the charge of those who would seek to regulate in the name of "religious tolerance".

In the moral sense.. all words are indeed legimate. You are free to refute or counter. I admire the American ideal of freedom of speech quite highly and it is unique.. and it is very much part of what makes the internet special.

Of course, they won't "curb Internet freedoms". They'll simply "outlaw dangerous speech", "protect the faithful from being offended by blasphemers", "create taxes to compensate creative organizations like newspapers", and "track online use to protect children". But no Internet freedoms will be harmed. Right.

There you go, telling the truth about the UN's view of human rights. They really don't want people reading all the way to the end of that charter. None of your rights is safe with the UN, but fools continue to trust them and defend them (our holy leader Obama being one of them).

Well, FDR did do some crazy shit, like making it illegal for Americans to own gold so that he could cheat on the currency (since no citizen could now redeem the bills for gold), and attempting to remove the SCOTUS as a check on federal power. Not in the same league as the others, to be sure, but certainly the same direction.